Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher.
But also, this is the story of that serial killer’s victims and their families-it’s as much a piercing portrait of grief as it is an investigative drama. In 2017, Foster decided it was time to tell the tale of the so-called Southside Strangler, whose killings in Richmond and Arlington were so hideously cruel they served as the basis of Patricia Cornwell thriller Post Mortem. In 1997, journalist Richard Foster started a job at Richmond alt-weekly Style Magazine-and discovered that a decade earlier, staffer Debbie Dudley Davis had been tortured, raped, and strangled to death inside her apartment. Listen on: WAMU NPR Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher Audible. In the process, she portrays the picky-eating, dance-loving, bike-racing Rudd-who remains missing-as a kid, not a character. But how could that- any of that-happen? Hill endeavors to find out, exploring whether anything could have been done to prevent the child’s disappearance. She was last spotted on a hotel security camera in the company of the shelter’s janitor, who had been posing as a doctor and spending time with Rudd. The eight year-old, who had been living with her mother at a city-run homeless shelter, was reported missing after not being seen for 18 days. WAMU producer Jonquilyn Hill’s terrific series focuses on the 2014 disappearance of DC second grader Relisha Rudd.
Want to dive into one? Here’s the best of the often terrifying, always tragic lot: And plenty of them have focused on DC area crimes both well-known (the Robert Wone murder) and overlooked (the 1970s serial killer known as the Freeway Phantom). Wine moms, forensic scientists, comics, journalists-everyone seems to have a true crime podcast these days.